A Fixture of Jerusalem Literary Life, Threatened with Deportation

The other day, I received an unusual petition, addressed to the interior minister of Israel (Eli Yishai, who is also the head of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Shas Party), in behalf of a man named Munther Fahmi, who is threatened with deportation. The thing that made it unusual was that (a) the deportee in question was not a political prisoner or militant or agitator but instead the founder and manager of a civilized Jerusalem bookstore, and (b) there was no stated reason for the deportation.

Fahmi runs the Bookshop at the American Colony Hotel, in Jerusalem; he is a fixture of Jerusalem literary life, and the Bookshop is considered one of the region’s best. It naturally caters to an élite foreign intelligentsia —in its hundred-and-twenty-year-old history, the hotel been host to numerous celebrity guests, from Winston Churchill and Laurence of Arabia to Graham Greene and Joan Baez—as an article on Fahmi’s plight, which appeared the other day in Haaretz, suggests. But the shop is also beloved by the local population. Fahmi is a friend and partner of the recently formed Palestine Festival of Literature, which brings local, regional, and international writers and artists to Palestinian audiences, and whose participants have included Suad Amiry, Claire Messud, Najwan Darwish, and Esther Freud, among many others. He also stocks one of the largest collections of books on Middle East history and politics. It is not a stretch to say that Fahmi’s Bookshop is a mainstay of Jerusalem cultural outreach.

On the face of it, Fahmi’s predicament appears to be a bureaucratic one, of the tedious, maddening, Michael Kohlhaas variety. Fahmi, who is Palestinian, was born in Jerusalem in 1954, and lived there until he was twenty-one, when he moved to the United States. After twenty years in the U.S., during which time he married an American and acquired a U.S. passport, he returned to Israel, following the signing of the Oslo Accords. But on his arrival at the airport in Tel Aviv, Fahmi claims he was told that his permanent-resident I.D.—after the 1967 war, all Arabs living in East Jerusalem who did not apply for citizenship were given permanent-resident I.D. cards—was no longer valid, and that he could return to his native city only on a tourist visa, using his American passport, which is what he has been doing for more than fifteen years. (Residency rights are revoked by the Israeli government in the event of a prolonged absence, or when a resident acquires a foreign passport; Israeli citizens, by contrast, may leave the country for any period without relinquishing citizenship or any of their rights.) Two years ago, Fahmi says, authorities began making his visa applications more difficult, and last month the interior ministry informed him that his visa, which expires on April 3rd, would no longer be renewed. Fahmi has gone through legal and other channels to reinstate his residency rights, but these efforts have so far been to no avail. As for signatures in support of his petition, he has already received hundreds, many of them attached to comments expressing outrage at the prospect of the shop’s closing and at the injustice of Fahmi’s prospective deportation:

“Munther Fahmy’s deportation is not only an infringement of the human right to settlement, but to freedom of speech. Israel presents itself in the international media as a democratic nation, using its cultural and intellectual cachet to drive tourism to the country. This deportation tarnishes and undermines that image.”

“Munther Fahmi is a central part of East Jerusalem’s cultural life. The idea that he could be deported from the city is both preposterous and evil. I personally and Zed Books will do all in our power to help and support him and this campaign.”

“this is part and parcel of israel’s colonization of east jerusalem as well as the project of erasing palestinian history. i fervently hope munther fahmy and this vital bookstore remain in their rightful place: jerusalem.”

But it remains unclear what effect, if any, this support will have on Fahmi’s fate in the face of Israel’s juggernaut shift to the right and its expansion into East Jerusalem. David Remnick recently asked Amos Schocken how he would feel if the embattled Haaretz folded or if he had to sell it to an owner with different principles. Schocken replied, “If we weren’t around, it would be . . . sad.”